Rocky and Bullwinkle tries to tap into the WarioWare formula, but ultimately falls short of its potential.

The characters Rocky and Bullwinkle strike a familiar chord with baby boomers. During their show’s on-again, off-again run from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, they captivated audiences young and old with a deft blend of madcap antics and timely themes, much the same way The Simpsons grabbed hold of its massive demographic during its creative peak in the 1990s. Perhaps that’s why Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Xbox Live Arcade game from Zen Studios, is such a disappointment. Though it tries to combine the source material with the frantic gameplay and zany visuals of WarioWare, it instead comes off as a half-baked attempt to cash-in on a beloved license.

You then have five seconds or so to button mash your way to victory, though chances are you’ll be seeing the failure message on the first try. With persistence, though, most minigames are easily mastered since same mechanics are recycled often with slightly different character art. You’ll wear out the left thumbpad paddling Rocky’s canoe ahead of Boris and Natasha (or vice versa).

You’ll break both triggers escaping from hungry natives, running down stairs, clambering down a beanstalk, or juggling balls. You’ll crack the face buttons charging up bonus points during the “Bonus Stag” and disarming a ticking time bomb. Repetition is so prevalent as you progress through each episode that it’ll begin to feel as if there are five basic games recycled 20 different ways. There is also Xbox Live Vision camera support for over two dozen minigames, but onscreen lag makes them almost unplayable. Instead you’ll break a sweat jumping up and down, only to get booed off the stage for having terrible rhythm.

The game makes very little use of its license. Sure, the characters are all there, and you get treated to some snippets of television footage and some sound bites, but there’s very little rhyme or reason to what you’re doing. While that worked fine for WarioWare it’s oddly confusing here, since you’re expecting some sort of narrative that’s seemingly missing. Add to that mix some cheap-looking, Flash quality animation and the whole thing starts to feel like it was slapped together to fill some arbitrary hole in a publishing calendar.

It’s a shame since the game shows some potential, both in concept and execution, that with a little more time and effort it could have been Xbox Live’s answer to Nintendo’s venerable microgame collection. In its present form, however, it’s unlikely to appeal to anyone except Achievement junkies or older gamers with a soft spot for the franchise. At 800 Microsoft Points, it’s just too pricey a package for what you get. Perhaps the sequel, should there be one, will do a better job. We certainly hope so.